Deadly Errors Read Online Free PDF

digits 911 after the message signaled an emergency. “Yes, I’d love to but I just got beeped … an emergency. Got something to write with?”
    “Yes.”
    He gave her his apartment phone number. “If I don’t answer, leave your telephone number. I’ll get back soon as I have a chance.” On second thought, might as well write it down now. He glanced around his cluttered desk and found a ballpoint advertising a new antibiotic. “What’s your number?”
    She recited it. He scribbled it on a Post-It.
    “I really want to see you again, Tyler.”
    His throat constricted, his eyes misted. “Me too, Nancy. Gotta run. Bye.” Reluctantly he hit the disconnect button and dialed the ED.
    “Doctor Mathews answering. What’ve you got?”
    “Thanks for getting back to me right away. Remember a patient, Larry Childs?”
    Tyler’s heart sank. “What? He have a seizure?”
    “No. Worse than that. Looks like he’s herniating.”
    “Herniating ? People with epilepsy don’t herniate, they seize.”
    “That’s all well and good, but that’s sure as hell what it looks like from this end. Guy’s left pupil’s blown, both disks show four plus papilledema and he’s Cheyne stoking.” Papilledema. A bad sign meaning the nerves at the back of the eyes were full of fluid from elevated pressure inside the skull.
    “Cheyne stoking?” An abnormal breathing pattern. “Damn.” Obviously, something other than his epilepsy was causing the problem. A subarachnoid hemorrhage? “Ordered an MRI yet?”
    “Scanner’s full with another emergency. He’s on his way to CT as we speak.”
    “I’ll be right down.”

    “M AN! NOW THAT’S what I call ugly ,” whispered the CT technician so the nurse from the Emergency Department on the other side of the lead impregnated glass couldn’t hear. The tech was an overweight, thirtyish woman with a duck’s ass haircut and a white polo shirt cut sleeveless to showcase tattooed barbed-wire encircling linebacker biceps. Tyler liked her because she could whip out three top quality scans in the time most techs took for two.
    Tyler stood in the scanner control room watching “slices” of Larry Childs’s brain appear as infinite shades of gray and black on a finger smudged 21-inch monitor. The air was stale from poor ventilation and smelled vaguely of electronics.
    Tyler mentally ticked through several possible causes for Larry’s problem. The entire left side of the kid’s brain was swollen, flattening the surface against the inside of the skull and obliterating the normal convolutions that characterize human cortex. Even more alarming was that the swollen left brain was compressing the normal right side and in the process had twisted the brain stem causing Larry’s coma.
    Tyler leaned out of the control room doorway, and said to the nurse, “I want 25 grams of Mannitol and ten milligrams of Decadron pushed STAT.”
    She cast a hesitant glance at her patient while untying the lead shield. “You’ll watch him?”
    “Of course, now go!”
    Tyler stepped down one step into the room that housed the GE-built scanner and accepted the lead-impregnated shield from her. Since the scan was over, he draped it on the wall holder over two similar protectors, then moved next to the table as the sliding gantry withdrew Larry Childs’s head from the huge cream-colored donut. Thin, gaunt, Larry’s pale white skin blended with the sheet covering him.
    Larry’s breathing was becoming more labored. Before the CT tech could leave the control room phone, Tyler yelled to her, “Page anesthesia and respiratory therapy, STAT. He needs to be intubated.”
    She flashed a thumbs up.
    Tyler pulled a penlight from his white coat to shine in Larry’s pupils. The right one was normal size and reactive. As billed, the left was dilated and non-reactive. Not bothering to test the corneal reflexes, Tyler tapped his reflex hammer against Larry’s biceps and patella tendons. The right-sided reflexes were distinctly